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Tuesday, 10 July 2012

Interview with Samuel Z Jones

Samuel Z Jones is a
prolific English fantasy writer. He lives on the Isle of Wight, and is
perpetually working on several novels simultaneously alongside other projects.

1.Tell us about the Akurite
Empire series of books.

Well,
it's epic fantasy, but I've been told by some readers that what I'm writing
goes beyond that definition. This isn't just another Lord of The Rings
knock-off about elves in the woods and dwarves
in the mines fighting orcs and goblins. There's none of that.

Can I summarise the plot of the
whole series? Um... five immortal heroes quest across the history of their
world to defeat an enemy from the distant future that plots to invade the past.

The story follows several
generations of characters through the rise and fall of nations on a mountain
plateau isolated from the rest of their world. Events sometimes take the story
beyond this region, but fundamentally the books concern the wars and alliances
between Silveneir, Kellia, Daricia and Uria.

The Silvans are a matriarchal,
religious culture that arrived from the east several centuries previously,
while the Kellions are a patriarchal nation from the distant west. These two
cultures are fundamentally polarized and their politics and conflicts comprise
much of the back-story underlying the setting. The Darians are a non-human race
that dominate the southern half of the plateau; they have as much in common
with elves as they do with trolls, being ageless and immortal but also
massively strong and muscular. They
are the giants, the titans of this world. Finally, Uria is populated by hybrid
beast men who are explicitly not natural races but rather the results of
medical experiments involving humans, Darians and animals.

The structure of the series, which
now runs to over a dozen books beginning with the Akurite Empire trilogy, is
dynastic, so talking about one or two particular characters isn't really
helpful; the lives of several hundred fictional people are interwoven so each
novel is part of a vast tapestry.

2.Why did you write this
series, and what do you hope to achieve with it?

You've heard of the Neverending
Story? Spoiler; it ends. But the idea at least was of a story that didn't. It's
something of the holy grail of fantasy; The Worm Ouroborous, or Moorcock's
Eternal Champion, Donaldson's Thomas Covenant, and others, have all tried to
create a self-contained fantasy world that runs like a perpetual motion
machine. Donaldson, I think, came closest quite recently with his Last
Chronicles.

I'm going to do it, though. The
overall plot forms a time loop, which when complete will allow a reader to pick
up the story at any point, at any volume, and read on from there until they
come full circle back to the place they started from. At this point, they will
discover that the first book they read has a second main plot woven through it
that they didn't notice first time around. And then a third time around. And a
fourth; each revolution revealing deeper and more detailed stories that were
previously invisible. I have the whole thing in draft, I'm halfway through
publishing, and already a few readers have noticed the interweaving and
layering of plotlines building this marvellous story-machine.

3.Is there an underlying
message in the Akurite Empire series?

I don't
set out to make any particular point when I write a novel; the theme or message
emerges from the process. Every book, conceptually, is an exploration of human
psychology; the way people perceive and construct reality. From that arises the
central theme of each book. I think in the current work-in-progress I'm saying
something about gender-roles and post-modern feminism, but that's honestly not
important if what you want is to read a good yarn about questing knights and
women with guns.

4.Of the characters
you’ve created, do you have a favourite? If so, why this particular character?

I approach characters as if I'm
getting to know a real person; after all, how well can you really know someone?
A supporting character I know about as well as someone I've had a few drinks
with, a main character is someone I know as well as a close friend.
Conceptually, I wander through an imagined forest meeting various people
camping there. Sometimes I spend weeks or months camping with one character,
hearing their stories and meeting their friends, before we part ways, perhaps
to cross paths again in the future. The first character I had this experience
with was Montesinos DeKellia, a character now so well developed that someone actually
succeeded in channelling him. The person in question had never read the books;
the mannerisms and expression of DeKellia simply overtook him for a few seconds
and told him to get lost. He was very shaken afterwards, he'd done a lot of
channelling and I sandbagged him with a fictional character.

Eventually, DeKellia told me he
was off on his own for a bit and left me to chat with Sabra Daishen. She was
his fencing student, a very aggressive but spiritual young woman who in her
turn introduced me to knights, outlaws, assassins and a whole host of other
people. I've also spent a great deal of time with DeKellia's son and Sabra's
sister, who eventually settled down together in a nice house in the woods.

5.What do you find most
rewarding in the writing process?

Reading it when it's done. When
writing, the story and imagery are changeable, reading it unfinished is part of
the writing and editing process. Once finished, reading it again is like
reading something written by someone else, but someone who actually writes what
I want to read. I want emotional realism, fully developed ideas, vivid imagery,
and that only crystallizes in the finished novel.

It's equally rewarding to know
that someone else has read and enjoyed one of my stories; writing is in many
ways an exercise in telepathy, I spend a great deal of time creating a highly
detailed thought, and writing is the only form we have of transmitting that
thought directly to another mind; even film doesn't quite do that, the imagined
world is on the screen, while with a book it takes shape within the reader's
mind, becomes a place they visit rather than a performance they watch.

6.What do you find most
challenging in the writing process, and how do you overcome it?

Making a living. The modern world
keeps hassling me for money. I'd like it to stop, please, and the only way I
can find of doing that is to sell enough books so I can write in peace.

7.Just how do you
produce so much work?

The way to learn any skill is to
practice every day. The way to get good is to practice every day for hours. To
write a book, you open your document and write at least one word per day. With
a little effort, you can train yourself to turn out 2000 words a day reliably.
With dedication, you can write 5000+ words a day, every day. Emotional and
material concerns do affect this; in the best possible state (which isn't,
incidentally, being happy and wealthy), I can write 10-15k words a day fairly
consistently. Akurite Empire, all 300,000 words of the trilogy, were written in
two months. Editing and proofing took a lot longer, but I left it alone for a
long time and wrote several other novels in the meantime.

On average, I write three novels
simultaneously and finish one or two a year.

8.Tell us about your
interest in martial arts and sword fighting.

From a
purely literary perspective, one should write what one knows, even in fantasy.
Others disagree, but logically if your genre features large amounts of horse
riding, camping, and sword fights, it really isn't tenable to know nothing
about them.

Let's
see... my grandfathers on both sides of the family were boxers, one a
professional coach and the other a bare-knuckle contender. I started Karate
aged six and have pursued every opportunity to train any martial art or combat
system since; I have about twenty five years of training. I hold a black belt,
I've taught martial arts and self-defence in some of the roughest areas of
London. Over the past few years, I've pursued Kobudo and Kobujutsu, which
broadly means archaic weapons; I've taught nunchaku and fencing, among other
things. I really will take any opportunity to grab a shinai (that's a Kendo
sword), and bound out into the garden to fight anyone who's willing. Without
body armour; padding is for sissies. I'd like to do more work with shields and
pole arms, and I've yet to find anyone brave enough to let me come at them with
my two-handed war flail... but we really would need armour for that (anyone
reading my work may have noticed that I hold a special fondness for the
terrifying two-handed flail, aka the threshal, corn flail, or a giant set of
nunchuks).

I make
an effort not to get technical when writing about swordfights and combat, but I
can't help think that direct experience and study can only improve the way I
write about these things.

9.What have you done to
promote and market your books, and what advice would you give to other authors?

Until quite recently, I was
running all over Facebook waving links at people. I have used Twitter, and it
does work, but I really don't like the site, it's like YouTube without videos.
Currently I don't have the regular Internet access to make serious marketing
efforts, but I do what I can. I'm looking forward to a near future where I can
use YouTube and similar media again. Without a huge publicity budget, one
really is down to WoM, even if we do that now online.

Advice... unless you can afford to
hire a publicist, don't pay for anything. Anyone asking for money to read your
book is ripping you off. The writer gets paid to write, they do not pay to be
read. If you're already making a living from your books, you might consider
hiring an editor or a proof-reader just to speed things up. If you really can
afford it, or you're lucky enough to find someone who'll work on commission,
hire a publicist.

Don't waste time canvassing blogs
and vlogs that purport to review books: these folk are either fan geeks who
want to bask in the reflected glory of their existing favourite authors, or
money-making enterprises that are only interested in well-known writers (who
already get tons of reviews anyway from both of the above).

If you want reviews and
interviews, talk to fellow writers who run their own blogs and need regular
posts (hi Wayne), these people are far more approachable and professional.

With ebooks, its possible to tap
those people who read so much that they'll review anything in their favourite
genre in exchange for a freebie. You can get a small fan club going like that,
but it's unlikely to be the foundation of wealth and fame.

Ultimately, if you're serious, you
have to approach the industry. That means contriving to sit down and have
drinks with people already working in some capacity in entertainment: most
deals are done at the bar, not over the phone, for what should be the obvious
reason that people deal sooner with their friends than with strangers.

10.Who, do you imagine,
would be your ideal reader?

My readership seem to be mostly
women. The most common thing people say about my stories is that they love the
strong female characters... I'm puzzled by this, I just work for psychological
realism. That means all my characters are products of their emotional traumas,
as are real people.

My ideal reader, I think, is
someone who wants to explore the frontiers of their own mind, and finds my stories
a useful map in an infinite territory.

11.What advice would you
give to help others build the confidence required to write novels?

...It's not really about
confidence. Writing is a learned skill, talent is just the desire to learn. Let
the first rule be “Rules are there for a reason”, learn what they are and why
they are the rules. Let the second rule be “Rules are there to be broken”, and
go wild with your imagination. Let the third rule be “No they're not, get over
yourself”, and put in the work necessary to develop technical skill.

Writing a novel is a massive
undertaking, and I'm constantly amazed at the number of people who don't seem
to realise that the primary skill of a writer is mastery of written language.
When you write well enough, in the technical sense of actually knowing what
you're doing as with any other skill, then confidence is not a major issue;
competence begets confidence.

12.Tell us about The
Flame of Freedom.

This was actually a paid
commission; there is a whole world of writing-for-hire which is hard to get
into and easy to fall out of, but when you're in it is a great boost: you're
actually getting paid a working wage to write! Break out the good booze and
smoke a fat cigar.

Flame of Freedom is a story of two
halves; George Washington at war, and Betsy Ross in British-occupied
Philadelphia. Everyone (I hope) knows who Washington is. Betsy Ross is the
woman who physically made the first American flag. It's officially considered
an apocryphal story, but having researched it in depth I can say it is
absolutely true.

Betsy lived directly across the
street from Ben Franklin and was close friends with his daughter Sarah. Betsy
was literally at the centre of the Culper Ring, Washington's spy network in
Philadelphia.

So The Flame of Freedom follows
the men's war on the battlefield and the women's war of espionage.

I'm currently working with the
same publisher who hired me for Flame of Freedom, Gabriel Murray. We're working
on a screen-adaptation of Hamlet. Gabriel's recent work includes Kingdom of
The Crystal Skull and Obama's Irish Roots.

13.Would you like to see
your books adapted for the screen? If so, do you have any aspirations or
reservations regarding this?

Yes! Give me my movie cheque! I
want to sit in casting sessions while Johnny Depp and Viggo Mortensen literally
fight it out to play Montesinos DeKellia! I want to lose my temper with
executives who keep presenting willowy bimbos to play the six-foot female
body-builder Sabra Daishen! I want to be presented with an endless queue of
tattooed models vying to play Sorcha! I want to point out to censors that if Dr
Manhattan can spend the whole of Watchmen literally balls-out naked, then
there's no reason Isa Maxine can't bound around topless the whole time!

Reservations? Yes, obviously;
there are great adaptations and awful ones. The great ones usually let the
actual writer of the actual book actually call some shots.

I envisage adaptations of my
stories as having the style and sensibility of Excalibur; if I'm writing with a
director in mind, it's John Boorman (armed with modern FX and a massive
budget). Much as I love the Lord of The Rings movies, the notion that all
fantasy should be like that is sorely mistaken. Look at the Narnia films;
someone in Hollywood thought that the way to do it was to smash Harry Potter
and LOTR headlong into each other. Doing a LOTR treatment on my stories would
have roughly the same effect; it's not LOTR, treating it as if it was would not
make a good movie. There's no sex in LOTR, just for a start.

14.Tell us a little about
a good fantasy book you’ve read recently.

Currently I'm reading Joseph
Campbell, which should say something about my grasp of mythology. I think the
last fantasy novel I read was Unseen Academical by Terry Pratchett. I'd avoided
this one because it's a fantasy about football, and I have no interest in
footie whatsoever. I actually devoured this book in two days flat though
because it had something unexpected; a good modern treatment of orcs.

I used to love Orcs as a kid, far
more than I liked elves. I've always been disappointed though that Tolkien
never went near the orcs as a culture or as characters, and attempts after him
to write something about Orcs have always been LOTR knock-offs.

Pratchett's treatment of orcs in
Unseen Academicals was brilliant, a well-spoken orc football player... I almost
gave up writing completely when I read Pratchett's Nation, but then I thought
“He's been writing professionally for over thirty years,of course he's
better than I am!” Then I pushed on and finished Akurite Empire, and I
personally reckon it's pretty good. I'm not as funny or as sociologically
incisive as Pratchett, but then I'm not trying to be: He's definitely an
influence, but I'm no more writing Discworld than I am LOTR.

15.What are you doing
now?

Writing or generally? Currently
I'm working on the final draft of book three of The Lord Protector series,
which is the sequel to Akurite Empire: While Sabra Daishen is away crusading,
her most trusted knight attempts to rebuild the nations shattered by war. At
the same time, I'm developing the rough drafts of three or four other novels in
the same series, getting ready to bring the epic around into its complete loop.
I'm also, as I mentioned, working on an adaptation of Hamlet.

Generally, I'm just waiting out
the summer before taking a place at Portsmouth University as a mature student.
It's about time I got a degree in Creative Writing, and Portsmouth quite
reasonably offered me a place on the strength of being a published author, even
if I am virtually unknown.

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About Me

I am a British author, filmmaker, artist, photographer, composer and producer of electronic music. I was born in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, but I have lived in England since 1984. I met my wife a year later and we have two amazing boys. We love travelling, and we have all studied martial arts. My wife and I produced Britain’s first martial arts movie. I also directed and co-produced a training DVD, which tackles the cause of anxiety and panic attacks.